New Brain Scanning Technique ‘Can Read Minds’

Scientists have discovered a new brain scanning technique which can bring the old mind-reading party trick closer to reality. With the help of a high resolution MRI and a mathematical model, Dutch researchers were able to convert brain activity into an actual image.
The Radboud University’s team tested the technology on several subjects which had been shown various letters. The scanning technique helped researchers reconstruct an image of the brain in the process of recognizing the letters.

The original image seen by the subjects is at the top, with the fMRI reconstructions below.

Scientists used a functional MRI (magnetic resonance imaging machine) to identify the parts of the brain that are active when someone is looking at a letter. The fMRI practically detects brain activity by identifying what parts of the brain have more blood flowing to them, a sign that that particular area is responding to stimuli.
Basically the fMRI scanned the occipital lobe of subjects who were shown the letters B, R, A, I, N and S. The scan created a speckled image that was then interpreted and translated into an image of the letters, with the help of a specifically designed computational model.
More specifically, the model was provided with previous knowledge of what the letters looked like and was therefore able to translate what seemed like a random fuzzy image as created by the MRI scan into a clear letter pattern.

This brain scanning technique may seem like just another trick, but Radboud scientists insist that the research is actually aimed at finding ways to model what our brains are experiencing, not just at reading our mind. The models obtained could be applied to subjective experiences such as dreams or even to working memories, researchers said.
The next step in the experiment is of course using a more powerful magnetic resonance imaging machine. The fMRI used in the research was able to scan at a resolution of 1,200 voxels but the team hopes to increase that to 15,000 voxels. And instead of letters, scientists will attempt to reconstruct images of faces shown to the subjects.
Even though it has a long way to go until developing into full mind reading capabilities, this brain scanning technology is nonetheless exciting. And scary at the same time. What do you think?

[Images via Wired]

Time to Say Goodbye to Windows XP

We’ve all been Windows users at some point. Even many hardcore Mac users today probably have a strong history with the much maligned operating system. One thing that everyone will probably agree with is this: Windows XP is one of the best operating systems that Microsoft has served us consumers. And now, it is time to say goodbye to Windows XP.

It’s official. Support for Windows XP is ending on the 8th of August 2014. As is the norm with these things, users are given ample time to make the switch if necessary. For individual users, this should be an easy fix. The chances are you’re using Windows 8 already anyway.
For businesses, though, especially the small to medium sized ones, the one-year breathing space might be more than necessary. After all, it’s not only about changing operating systems. Hardware upgrades and new purchases may also be called for. Then there’s the learning curve to get used to the changes.
Of course, one may opt to stick with Windows XP till their device dies on them. Microsoft is not stopping anyone from doing that, but without support for the software, it’s very much akin to having a car for which you can’t buy parts anymore.  At the end of the day, you might as well make it easier on you then, by saying goodbye to Windows XP.
It is worth noting, though, that Microsoft has not scrimped on its efforts to convince people to stop using XP. In fact, they released an infographic wishing XP a happy retirement, urging people to upgrade to Windows 8. Considering the fact that 37.7 percent of PCs in the world are still running on Windows XP, Microsoft’s efforts are justified.
Take a look for yourself, in case you’re one of those who need some convincing.



[Images via Les Numeriques and Microsoft]

Facebook Wants to Give Internet to 5 Billion People

Mark Zuckerberg has a dream. And if we’ve learned anything from the ‘Social Network’ is that what the Facebook founder wants, the Facebook founder gets.

This time, Zuckerberg wants to give Internet to 5 billion people. Just imagine how many new Facebook users that means.

Joking aside, and trying to ignore the profit such an enterprise could bring, Facebook has actually teamed up with several tech giants to set up Internet.org, an organization whose main target is to bring the WWW to those parts of the world that still don’t have access to it. Other founding members include Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm and Samsung, among others.


The organization names three major lines of action to reach their goals of offering widespread Internet access as a means to boost social, economic and political development and contribute to humankind progress, according to a UN Human Rights Council quote posted on the Internet.org website.

The first step is to make Internet access more affordable, possibly by using high quality, yet lower cost smartphones. The second step is to use data in a more efficient manner; more specifically, to reduce the amount of data most Internet applications require, and one way to achieve this is by improving the infrastructure.  And the third step would be to bring in businesses that would support the project by offering them incentives.

One can’t ignore that this is quite an ambitious plan, even if it is far from being an altruistic one. All the companies involved, Facebook included, would benefit from bringing Internet to 5 billion people. According to the group, only a little over one third of the world’s population, 2.7 billion people have Internet access at the moment.

In an interview with CNN, Zuckerberg insisted that connectivity is a human right and would offer people access to things such as healthcare and information about their country’s state of affairs, ultimately helping them decide what sort of government they want.
Which is truly admirable, but it will take a lot of time until the plan can become reality, according to analysts. One of the major issues that the Internet.org initiative will have to overcome is the lack of a constant electricity supply in most developing countries that the program is targeting. Other problems include the lack of proper infrastructure, poverty and illiteracy.
In other words, all those billions of new Facebook users won’t be able to share much and tag themselves in photos if they can’t read or only have enough electricity to check their feed only a couple of times per week.

So overall, the Internet.org plan to bring Internet to 5 billion people is a good idea, but unlikely to happen any time soon. What do you think of the initiative? Should the tech giants behind it focus on other priority issues for the developing world before going ahead with the connectivity idea?

[Image via under30ceo]

An iPhone Camera Periscope Makes Stalking a Breeze

Whether you're documenting something bizarre you saw on the subway, or secretly capturing images of your crush, this rotating spy lens from Photojojo makes it incredibly easy to covertly capture images on your iPhone. Think of it as a tiny periscope for your smartphone, but instead of torpedoing frigates, you can use it to sink reputations, or just collect some useful blackmail material.

For $20 you get the lens and an adhesive magnetic ring that sits flush on the back of your iPhone 4 or 5 making it easy to attach and remove the accessory. And if paired with one of the countless apps that disguise the fact you're taking a photo, most people will be none the wiser of your covert photography. Sure, it's good for plenty of practical uses—Instagramming a meal, shooting at extreme angles—but what's the fun in that next to some good ol' fashioned creeping? [Photojojo Store]

A Visual Tour of the Research Base At the End of the World

It's not hard to make the arctic beautiful. But the observatories, abandoned factories, and shipwrecks scattered across its white expanse? That's tougher. For Reuben Wu, a landscape photographer who's shot everywhere from Svalbard to the Atacama Desert, that was exactly the allure.

Wu is a musician by trade-he's one third of electro trio Ladytron and a DJ the rest of the time-and his success with music is part of what's enabled his career as a photographer to blossom. Traveling the world on tour, he's been able to visit an incredible wealth of unusual places-and shoot them, usually using his beloved Polaroid. "On my travels I've been spoilt by the amount of stuff I've been able to see," he tells Gizmodo. "And over the years I have become more and more attracted to the dark and hidden things which most people have forgotten about, yet have their own aura of history and identity."
Among those "dark and hidden things?" The long-abandoned Sea Forts in the English channel, built during World War II to monitor Nazi aircraft. Decaying "sound mirrors," an early, low-tech concrete structure that concentrated sound waves to detect radar. Wu sums up his motives succinctly, saying, "basically, I'm a weird rebel tourist."

Abandoned WWII-era Sea Forts, in the middle of the English Channel.
In 2011, Wu traveled to Svalbard, the collection of remote islands in the far north of Norway. Though it's been host to dozens of temporary human settlements over the centuries, it remains a largely uninhabited place. The main permanent settlement-Longyearbyen-supports a few hundred scientists, serving as a base camp for research going on elsewhere in the arctic. But Wu, in his own words, wanted to explore "all the hidden things that normally go unnoticed by tourists." He visited sites like the Svalbard Seed Vault, an ice-encrusted bunker where scientists are amassing thousands of seed samples in case of a catastrophe, and Barentsburg, an abandoned Russian settlement that still boasts huge statues of Lenin and Social Realist artwork.
Below, see a few of the highlights from the trip. And if you want a creepily appropriate audio accompaniment, check them out while listening to Jonny Cash read the classic 1907 poem, The Cremation of Sam McGee, which tells the story of an arctic miner's ghost.

The observatory in the Atacama Desert, on the edge of the Andes in South America.

How to Encrypt your Gmail Messages with Google Docs

 

Lately there has been a lot of chatter about email tracking and how government agencies are snooping on email conversations. If you are looking for ways to keep your email private and would not like anyone else to read your confidential Gmail messages (except for the recipient), you should consider encrypting your email before hitting the send button.

There are a couple of browser extensions that help you encrypt Gmail but here we discuss a new and more simple Google Docs based encryption method that works across all browsers and requires no add-ons or apps. You secure your message with a strong password and the recipient will have to enter the same password in order to decrypt your message.

For the technically oriented, our Google Docs based solution encrypts (and decrypts) your email messages using the industry-standard AES algorithm which is implemented in Google Apps Script using SJCL, a JavaScript library for cryptography developed at Stanford.

How to Encrypt Gmail Messages
Sender’s Computer – Encrypt the message before sending
 

1)  Open Gmail and compose a new email message. Put the recipient’s email address in the “To” field, add a subject (this won’t be encrypted) and put your message in the email body. DO NOT hit the send button, let the message stay in your Gmail drafts folder.

2) Click here to make a copy of the “Encrypt Gmail” sheet in your Google Drive. Choose Gmail->Initialize and allow the sheet to access your Gmail account.
 

3)  Pick your Gmail draft from the drop-down, enter a password and hit “Send Mail.”

The Google Sheet will now encrypt your email message using AES and it gets delivered to the recipient via your Gmail account. Let’s now switch to the recipient’s machine and see how they can decrypt the message.
Recipient’s Computer – Decrypt the encrypted Gmail Message

1) Open the encrypted Gmail message that just landed in your mailbox, select the body of the email and copy it to your clipboard.
2) Go to Decrypt Gmail, enter the secret password (that the sender shared with you over a phone call) and paste the encrypted email message. Hit the “Decrypt” button to see the original message.

Encrypting email with Google Docs is easy and the other advantage is that recipients can decrypt the encrypted message using any browser without requiring apps or browser add-ons.


One more thing. When you write a draft message inside Gmail, it is automatically stored on Google’s servers. If you would like to keep Google out of the loop, you can write the message outside Gmail (say inside Notepad) and encrypt it offline before sending the message via Gmail.

You can also use these encrypt and decrypt tools to send confidential messages on other channels like Facebook, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, etc. These tools encrypt & decrypt text inside your browser and none of your data ever leaves the local computer. ↓

How to Edit PDF Files without Adobe Acrobat

The PDF file format was originally created by Adobe in the early ’90s and there are now over 700+ million PDF documents on the Internet according to Google (search for filetype:pdf).
There are several reasons why the PDF file format is so popular for exchanging all sorts of documents including presentations, CAD Drawings, invoices and even legal forms.

• PDF files are generally more compact (smaller in size) than the source document and they preserve the original formatting.
• Unlike Word and other popular document formats, the content of a PDF file cannot be modified easily. You can also prevent other users from printing or copying text from PDF documents.
• You can open a PDF file on any computer or mobile device with free software like Adobe Acrobat Reader. Google Chrome can read PDFs without requiring plugins and it can create PDFs.

Edit PDF Files using Free Alternatives to Adobe Acrobat

While PDF Files are “read only” by default, there are ways by which you can edit certain elements* of a PDF document for free without requiring the source files or any of the commercial PDF editing tools like Adobe Acrobat.
We will primarily focus on tools that let you alter the actual contents of a PDF file>. If you are looking to manipulate the PDF file structure itself like rearranging pages or merging multiple PDFs into one

An Online PDF Editor for Basic Tasks

Sometimes you need to make minor changes to a PDF file. For instance, you may want to hide your personal phone number from a PDF file before uploading it online or may want to annotate a page with notes and freehand drawings.
You can perform such edits in a PDF easily with PDFEscape.com, an online PDF editor that is free and also lets you edit password-protected PDF documents in the browser.
With PDF Escape, you can hide* parts of a PDF file using the whiteout tool or add annotations with the help of custom shapes, arrows, text boxes and sticky notes. You can add hyperlinks to other PDF pages / web documents.

[*] Hiding is different from redaction because here we aren’t changing the associated metadata of a PDF file but just hiding certain visible parts of a PDF file by pasting an opaque rectangle over that region so that the stuff beneath the rectangle stays invisible.

Change Metadata of PDF Files

If you would like to edit the meta-data associated* with a PDF document, check out Becy PDFMetaEdit. This is a free utility that can help you edit properties of a PDF document including the title, author name, creation data, keywords, etc.
The tool can also be used for removing PDF passwords as well as for encrypting PDF documents such that only users who know the password can read the contents of your PDF files. And since this PDF metadata plus bookmarks editor can be executed from the command line, you can use it to update information in multiple PDF files in a batch.
[*] If you planning to post your PDF files on the web, you should consider adding proper metadata to all the files as that will help improve the organic rankings of your PDF files in Google search results.

Edit the Text of a PDF File

If you want to edit the text in a PDF file but don’t have access to the source documents, your best bet is that you convert the PDF file into an editable Word document or an Excel spreadsheet depending on the contents of the PDF.
Then edit these converted PDFs in Microsoft Office (or Google Docs) and export the modified files back into PDF format using any PDF writer.
If your PDF document is mostly text, you may use the desktop version of Stanza to convert that PDF into a Word document. If the document includes images, charts, tables and other complex formatting, try the online PDF to Word converter from BCL Research or the one from NitroPDF – the former offers instant conversion while the latter service can take up to a day though its yields more accurate results.

Advanced PDF Editing (Images, text, etc.)

Now that you know the basic PDF editing tools, let’s look at another set of PDF editors that are also free but can help you do some more advanced editing like replacing images on a PDF file, adding signatures, removing blocks of text without breaking the flow of the document, etc.
First there’s PDF XChange, a free PDF viewer and editor that you also may use for typing text directly on any PDF page. PDF XChange also supports image stamps so you may use the tool for signing PDF files or for inserting images anywhere on a PDF page.
Then you have Inkscape, a free vector drawing tool (like Adobe Illustrator) that can natively import and export PDF content.

Video: How to Edit PDF Files with Inkscape

With Inkscape, you can select any object on a PDF page (including text, graphics, tables, etc.) and move them to a different location or even remove them permanently from the PDF file. You can also annotate PDF files with Inkscape or draw freehand on a page using the built-in pencil tool.
The next tool in the category of advanced PDF editors is OpenOffice Draw with the PDFImport extension. OpenOffice Draw supports inline editing so you can easily fix typos in a PDF document or make formatting related changes like replacing color, increasing or decreasing the text size, replacing the default font-family, etc.
Like Inkscape, the OpenOffice toolbox also includes support for annotations, shapes, images, tables, charts, etc. but here you have more choices and the software also looks less complex.


The OpenOffice suite is a little bulky (they don’t provide a standalone installer for Draw) but if you have the bandwidth, OpenOffice is the best tool for manipulating PDF documents when you don’t have the budget for Adobe Acrobat.